"I Know What I'm Like"

When someone tells me "I will blank," they don't say it like a fear.

They say it like a fact.

"I know I'll go red."

"I always lose my train of thought."

"I just talk too much and don't land the point."

"I know what I'm like."

There's no "I'm worried I might." There's no curiosity. It's delivered with the tone of: this is how gravity works.

And that matters.

Because the nervous system isn't anticipating danger. It's remembering danger. The body isn't preparing for a possibility. It's re-running a script it believes is proven.

That's why logic doesn't touch it.

You can know your material. You can prepare thoroughly. But when the moment comes, something high in your gut clenches and contracts, and suddenly you're not in the room anymore. You're in every version of this moment that's ever gone wrong.

The cost doesn't start when you stand up to speak. It starts days before, when your focus narrows and everything else slips. You can't switch off. Meals become basic. Your patience shortens. The people you love feel it, even if you don't say anything.

You deliver the thing. Maybe it goes fine. Maybe it doesn't.

Either way, you crash. You wake up exhausted. Not from the hour itself, but from everything it took to get through it.

Then the replaying starts. That pause. That fumbled moment. It becomes bigger than the forty minutes that went well. You edit yourself in retrospect. You shrink around it.

Because underneath the performance anxiety is usually something older. A belief formed through comparison, through ranking, through growing up next to people who seemed more capable. When something goes wrong, it doesn't feel like feedback. It feels like confirmation.

That's when the real cost escalates.

Now it isn't just one presentation. It's whether you put yourself forward again. Whether you speak. Whether you allow the work you love to stay central in your life.

If fear wins often enough, it doesn't just drain energy. It quietly edits your future.

You were paid for the hour. But the days of hyper-focus beforehand, the crash afterwards, the questioning that follows—that's what you actually paid.

Here's what shifts first when this pattern changes.

Surprise.

Not confidence. Not calm. Surprise.

Someone discovers they're excited about a meeting they used to dread. Or after years of holding back, they just say the thing—and feel comfortable doing it. They answer a question with confidence and their own behaviour takes them by surprise.

It might be how they feel before. What happens during. Or the quiet that comes into their mind after.

The surprise is the sign.

Because for the first time, the script didn't run. The body stopped remembering danger and started noticing possibility.

That moment—when you catch yourself feeling or doing something different and think "wait, that's not how this usually goes"—that's the breakthrough.

Not because the stakes have lowered. Because the prediction didn't come true.

And once that happens, what other people find mundane—a meeting, a presentation, a moment of visibility—becomes something you didn't think you were allowed to feel about work: exciting.

The future you want doesn't require you to stop feeling fear.

It requires you to stop treating fear's predictions as facts.

If you want calm instead of the knot in your stomach, and quiet afterwards instead of replay,

start a conversation with me. The link is here.